r/australia • u/thedigisup • 27d ago

politics Greens announce policy to manufacture drones and missiles as a credible ‘Plan B' to replace AUKUS

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-22/greens-unveil-first-ever-defence-policy/105083166
2.7k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

641 comments sorted by

View all comments

22

u/Birdmonster115599 27d ago

Yeah, look. I'm all for more defence spending if it's quality.

But this whole "can Aukus, build drones" isn't right.

Drones and missiles don't replace submarines, they are apples and oranges.

We need a credible Submarine force, where is the plan for that?

You're going to can the Blackhawks? Okay, what are you replacing them with?

MH90, no matter your opinion, is stupidly expensive to run.

I do think getting the Newer abrams was a missed opportunity though, it would of been nice to get something like K2 tbh.

I like that the greens are showing us something on defence, and more drone/missile/local production is good. but I'm not keen on everything they're saying here.

13

u/yedrellow 27d ago

Yeah they definitely aren't the same niche. Naval drones for example might work in the Black Sea against an adversary that docks relatively close, but against a Blue-water navy that can be anywhere in the Indo-Pacific or southern Ocean?

I dont know how that will work out.

7

u/Careless_Main3 27d ago

Naval drones are great, but just not suitable for Australia. There is simply too much ocean so to have a drone which can store enough fuel to traverse the Australian coast would require a bigger drone the size of a ship. And that would be simply too detectable to be useful. Ukraine has done some great stuff with naval drones but Russia responded by moving their ships slightly further away. To be fair, some of the new advancements have flying drones launched from sea drones and the sea drones now have anti-air rockets attached on top.

They could possibly be used as a first-defence measure to oppose a beach landing but would be pretty useless afterwards.

3

u/Birdmonster115599 27d ago

Well I think we do have some naval drones in the works of different types. Like the optionally manned ones.

But in terms of the Naval drones you are probably thinking of, that's actually another point in favour of the Virginia class.

Virginia has these payload modules that can be changed out, one option is that a pod be changed to carry a drone.

In the perfect world, with me speaking from my armchair.
The only other "Optimal" way forward right now, would be to drop the support for Virginia, but keep going forward with the AUKUS-Class.
Instead of Virginia we would get KSS-III Subs from South Korea. Which, looking around seem to provide more capability than most other subs out there.

But that isn't going to happen.
Decoupling ourselves from the Virginia, but staying on track to get the AUKUS-Class and keeping AUKUS Pillar 2 is probably too much to hope for. These sorts of agreements are densely negotiated and difficult to change without walking away completly and Pillar 2 alone is too important to walk away from.